Turandot's Victory

Turandot's Victory J. M. Balkin* Notte senza lumicino gola nera d'un camino son pii's chiare degli enigmi di Turandot! Night without a lamp, the black flue of a chimney, are clearer than the riddles of Turandot. -Ping, Pang, and Pong, Turandot, Act I Hai vinto tu! You have conquered! -Calaf to Turandot, Turandot, Act III Puccini's Turandot might seem an unlikely source of insights for feminist theory. It is, after all, an opera composed by a rake based upon a play written by a misogynist. Yet it is the uncanny nature of great works of art that they often undermine and even transcend the prejudices of the artists who create them. Of course, this begs an important question. Is Turandot a great work of art? Or is it a flawed work, an imperfect masterpiece? The final transformation of its central character, Turandot, from sworn enemy of the male sex to loving spouse, has always seemed unconvincing even to the opera's greatest champions. Turandot is an enigma because Turandot herself is also an enigma. What complicates matters is that we do not have before us a finished work. Puccini never completed the final scene in which Turandot's transformation takes place; one had to be constructed from his sketches, a task performed by the composer Franco Alfano. Yet even with this supple- ment, the opera still seems to lack closure. It is left unfinished precisely where completion would be most crucial-at the place where we would * I would like to thank Pat Cain, Sandy Levinson, Guillermo Margadant, and Margret Wolfe for their comments on previous drafts. My special thanks to Anne Goldstein and Zipporah Wiseman, who were extremely generous with their time and their ideas; their involvement at key points in the development of this Article has greatly affected and improved my interpretation of Turandot. Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 2, Iss. 2 [1990], Art. 5 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 2: 299 finally understand Turandot herself, and why she is willing to put aside her hatred and exchange it for love. The subject of this Article, then, is the Riddle of Turandot, or perhaps more correctly, the Riddles of Turandot, for the Riddle takes many different forms. There are the riddles that Turandot proposes to the hero, Calaf. There is the riddle that Calaf offers her in return. There is the riddle of Turandot's ending-how Puccini would have drawn together the strands of this unfinished opera. There is the riddle of the character of Turandot, left unexplained. And finally, there is the riddle that Turandot herself symbolizes: the riddle of the Other-the questions that men and women, but especially men, pose to themselves about the other sex. The question left unanswered in Turandot-one of the many Riddles of Turandot-is an account of Turandot's subjectivity or inner life-the desires and beliefs that result in her transformation from avenger to lover. And in one sense the entire opera is about this unanswered question-what this mysterious woman, Turandot, truly wants. Yet even this question poses further riddles, for it is not at all what it seems. Turandot is one of many portraits of women composed by Puccini, a portrait to stand with his best: Manon, Mimi, Tosca, and Cio-Cio-San. Yet because Turandot is a portrait, it is not about a real woman, Turandot, but is only a depiction of a woman, created by a male artist-a depiction which is at the last moment left unfinished, thus revealing even more clearly its simulated character. This fact, I shall argue, is crucial to a feminist analysis of this work.' The question of a woman's subjectivity, or inner life, when asked alter- nately by a man and a woman, may have very different meanings. When asked by the female artist, it might be no more than an inquiry into her own subjectivity, and thus a pursuit of self-knowledge. However, when asked by a male artist, who may lack significant access to female subjectivity, it may be simply another version of Freud's famous question-what 1. Since I describe this Article as "feminist," I should perhaps make clear the relation of my own work to the many different versions of feminism. This Article and its analysis is "feminist" in the sense that it seeks to uncover and examine the gendered nature of discourse-in this case, an opera by Giacomo Puccini. Its method, however, is perhaps more correctly termed deconstructive. Of course, these two approaches often overlap. Much feminist work is deconstructive or is influenced by deconstruction. E.g., L. Iragary, This Sex Which Is Not One (1985); New French Feminisms (E. Marks & I. de Courtviron ed. 1981); Feminism/Post-Modernism (L. Nicholson ed. 1990); Feminism As Cri- tique: Essays on the Politics of Gender (S. Benhabib & D. Cornell ed. 1988). On the intersections between feminism and poststructuralism generally, see C. Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststruc- turalist Theory (1987); R. Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction 217-33 (1989). Conversely, some deconstructionist scholars, both male and female, have written on feminist topics. E.g, J. Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1978); Derrida, Women in The Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida, in Men in Feminism (A. Jardine & P. Smith eds. 1987); B. Johnson, A World of Difference (1987); J. Culler, On Deconstruction 46-64 (1982). Despite the overlap, there are never- theless potential theoretical conflicts between a deconstructive approach and some forms of feminism. See Alcoff, Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism:The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory, 13 Signs 405 (1988); Showalter, Critical Crossdressing:Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year, in Men in Feminism, supra, at 116; Scholes, Reading like a Man, in Men in Feminism, supra, at 204. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol2/iss2/5 2 Balkin: Turandot's Victory 19901 Balkin does a woman want?-a question with overtones of longing, bewilder- ment, frustration, or even misogynism.2 And if the male artist asks this question because he lacks understanding of feminine subjectivity, the answer he gives is likely to be unconvincing.8 The problem of the male artist who attempts to describe the subjectivity of women is recapitulated at a different level by the male scholar who seeks to employ feminist analysis in his own work. The male feminist scholar does not avoid the question of women's subjectivity. He must still ask himself what feminism is and what women are. And once again, this question has very different meanings when asked by men and when asked by women. This problem puts into question the very project of this Arti- cle, for even to attempt this work raises the difficult question of how men can ever successfully engage in feminist scholarship." The male feminist scholar finds himself in a double bind. If male scholars attempt to think and write as if they were women, the possibility that men lack access to significant features of feminine subjectivity suggests that their scholarship will be at best a pale imitation of feminist scholarship and at worst an unconscious parody.' On the other hand, if male scholars too readily accept the claim that men and women are fundamen- tally different in their experiences and thought processes, they fall into the opposite trap, currently criticized as the error of "essentialism."' 2. Freud's remark was made to his friend, the Princess Marie Bonaparte: "The great question • ..which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" The MacMillan Dictionary of Quotations 618-19 (1989); P. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time 501 (1988). A man's question about women's subjectivity often disguises a different question-about what women want of men, or about what men want of women. In Freud's case, for example, the question was instrumental: how women would or could fit into his theory of sexuality. 3. The problem of accurately capturing the subjectivity of women does not seem to arise so ur- gently for women artists, because they do have direct access to at least one form of feminine subjectivity-namely, their own. Yet at the same time the distinction between male and female artists is much too simplistic. From another perspective, a white middle class American woman might also be said to have a very different subjectivity from the Chinese princess Turandot. See the discussion of essentialism, infra note 6. Thus, the artist always faces a problem in describing the inner life of others who differ from her in any respect, for one can never know what is in another's mind, and all kersons have different experiences shaped by differences in culture, class, and historical situatedness. Conversely, the problem of subjectivity is never totally insurmountable; because all of us are human beings living on the same planet, there is always some commonality to our thought processes and experiences. But many forms of feminist analysis depend heavily upon the assumption that men and women do not always experience the world in the same way, and that these differences in subjectivity are quite important, even if there are further and equally significant differences in subjectivity among the mem- bers of each sex. 4. Compare, e.g., C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified 56-57 (1987); Littleton, Reconstructing Sexual Equality, 75 Cal. L. Rev. 1279, 1294 n.91 (1987) (skeptical about the possibilities) with Bart- lett, Feminist Legal Methods, 102 Harv. L. Rev.

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